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Richard E. Smalley - Biographical

I was born in
Akron, Ohio on June 6, 1943, one year to the day before D-Day,
the allied invasion at Normandy. The youngest of four children, I
was brought up in a wonderfully stable, loving family of strong
Midwestern values. When I was three my family moved to Kansas
City, Missouri where we lived in a beautiful large home in a
lovely upper-middle class neighborhood. I grew up there (at least
to the extent one can be considered to be grown up on leaving for
college at age 18) and was convinced that Kansas City, Missouri
was the exact center of the known universe.

My mother, Esther Virginia Rhoads, was the third of six children
of Charlotte Kraft and Errett Stanley Rhoads, a wealthy
manufacturer of furniture in the Kansas City area. She liked the
unusual name Errett so much that she gave it to me as my middle
name. She picked the name Richard after the crusading English
king (the Lion-Hearted), but being a good American and suitably
suspicious of royalty, she was fond of calling me "Mr. President"
instead. She had big plans for me, and loved me beyond all
reason.

My father, Frank Dudley Smalley, Jr., was the second of four
children born to Mary Rice Burkholder and Frank Dudley Smalley
(Sr.), a railroad mail clerk in Kansas City. Although my father
went by the name of June (short for Junior), he never quite
forgave his father for not having given him a name of his own,
and for not having aspired to more in life. My father started
work as a carpenter, and then as a printer's devil, working for
the local newspaper, The Kansas City Star, and later for a
farm implement trade journal, Implement and Tractor. By
the time he retired in 1963 he had long since risen to be CEO of
this company, and a group of several others that published trade
journals in the booming agriculture industry throughout the
Western Hemisphere. He was incredibly industrious, talented, and
fascinated with both business and technology. He had a
wonderfully analytic mind, and loved argument, open discussion,
and homespun philosophy. During the depression in the early
1930's he married my mother (who fell in love with his blue eyes)
and was promptly laid off from work. The story of his career is
one of total dedication to both his work and his family, a
dedication that held steady through a series of tribulations, many
of which I am only now beginning to appreciate. He loved me too,
but he could see himself in me, and knew my failings through and
through. Until late in life I was never quite good enough for my
father, and I suppose that is part of what drives me even now,
well after his death in 1992.

My interest in Science had many roots. Some came from my mother
as she finished her B.A. Degree studies in college while I was in
my early teens. She fell in love with science, particularly as a
result of classes on the Foundations of Physical Science taught
by a magnificent mathematics professor at the University of Kansas
City, Dr. Norman N. Royall, Jr. I was infected by this
professor second hand, through hundreds of hours of conversations
at my mother's knees. It was from my mother that I first learned
of Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and
Darwin. We spent hours together collecting single-celled
organisms from a local pond and watching them with a microscope
she had received as a gift from my father. Mostly we talked and
read together. From her I learned the wonder of ideas and the
beauty of Nature (and music, painting, sculpture, and
architecture). From my father I learned to build things, to take
them apart, and to fix mechanical and electrical equipment in
general. I spent vast hours in a woodworking shop he maintained
in the basement of our house, building gadgets, working both with
my father and alone, often late into the night. My mother taught
me mechanical drawing so that I could be more systematic in my
design work, and I continued in drafting classes throughout my 4
years in high school. This play with building, fixing, and
designing was my favorite activity throughout my childhood, and
was a wonderful preparation for my later career as an
experimentalist working on the frontiers of chemistry and
physics.

The principal impetus for my entering a career in science,
however, was the successful launching of Sputnik in 1957, and the
then current belief that science and technology was going to be
where the action was in the coming decades. While I had been a
rather erratic student for many years, I suddenly became very
serious with my education at the beginning of my junior year in
the fall of 1959. I set up a private study in the partly
furnished, unheated attic of our home, and began to spend long
hours in solitude studying and reading (and smoking cigarettes).
This happened to be the year when I began to study chemistry for
the first time. Luckily, these years were some of the best ever
for the public school system in Kansas City, and my local high
school, Southwest High, was one of the most effective anywhere in
the US as measured by scores on standard achievement tests, and
the fraction of students going on to college. My teacher, Victor
E. Gustafson, was a great inspiration. He had just begun to teach
the preceding year, and was full of love for his subject and for
teaching, and had an as yet unblunted ambition to reach even the
slowest of students. In addition, this was the first class I had
ever taken with my sister, Linda, who was a year older than I,
and was a far better student than I had ever been. The result was
that by the end of the year, my sister and I finished with the
top two grades in the class. We hardly ever missed a question on
an exam. It was an exhilarating experience for me, and still
ranks as the single most important turning point in my life, even
from my current perspective of nearly four decades later. It was
the proof of an existence theorem. After my junior year, I knew I
could be successful at science. The next year I did equally well
in physics with a wonderful professor, J.C. Edwards, but my soul
had already been imprinted by my exposure to chemistry the year
before.

My mother's youngest sibling, Dr. Sara Jane Rhoads, was one of
the first women in the United States to ever reach the rank of
full Professor of Chemistry. After earning her Ph.D. in 1949 with
William von Eggers Doering, who was then at Columbia
University, she devoted her life to teaching and research in
the Department of Chemistry of the University of Wyoming. She received the
Garvan Medal of the American Chemical Society in 1982 for her
contributions to physical organic chemistry, particularly in the
study of the Cope and Claisen rearrangements. She was the only
scientist in our extended family and was one of the brightest
and, in general, one of the most impressive human beings I have
ever met. She was my hero. I used to call her, lovingly, "The
Colossus of Rhoads". Her example was a major factor that led me
to go into chemistry, rather than physics or engineering. One of
the most enjoyable memories of my early life was the summer
(1961) I spent working in her organic chemistry laboratory at the
University of Wyoming. It was at her suggestion that I decided to
attend Hope College that fall in Holland, Michigan. Hope had then
(and still has now) one of the finest undergraduate programs in
chemistry in the United States.

At Hope College I spent two years in fruitful study, but decided
to transfer to the University of Michigan in Ann Arborafter my favorite
professor, Dr. J. Harvey Kleinheksel, died of a heart attack, and
the organic chemistry professor with whom I had hoped to do
research, Dr. Gerrit Van Zyl, announced his retirement. While the
next two years in Ann Arbor were successful, I had become so
entangled in a stormy love affair with a lovely girl back at Hope
College, that I was not able to concentrate as much on science as
I should have. I did, however, learn a lot. Most of all I learned
from my fellow students, and particularly from John Seely Brown,
a graduate student in mathematics who lived in an apartment down
the hall in a small house off campus (he is currently Director of
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, PARC). John displayed an
audacity of thought and intellectual ambition that I have rarely
seen in any individual. My fellow housemates and I were infected
with the notion that we could master any subject, and at times we
did manage to at least feel that we got close.

By the time of my graduation in 1965, the job market for
scientists in the United States was at an all-time high, and even
chemistry graduates with just a BS degree were in great demand.
Rather than proceeding directly to graduate school, I decided to
take a job in the chemical industry in order to buy a bit of time
to see what I really wanted to do in science, and to live a
little in the "real" world. It turned out to be a terrific
decision.

In the fall of 1965 I began work full time in Woodbury, New
Jersey at a large polypropylene manufacturing plant owned by the
Shell Chemical Company. I began as a chemist working in the
quality control laboratory for the plant, a 24 hour a day
operation that in the mid 60's was quite a wonderland of high
technology. My first boss was a chemist named Donald S. Brath. He
taught his young professionals that "chemists can do anything",
and the time I worked under him was a wonderfully broadening
experience. I was teamed up with chemical engineers at the plant
to study problems with the quality of the polymer product. The
Ziegler-Natta catalyst system then in use by Shell to produce
isotactic polypropylene was no where near as efficient as those
currently in use, and the level of inorganics remaining in the
polymer was high. Much of what we were concerned with in those
days revolved around this problem of high "ash" content and how
it affected the downstream applications. These were fascinating
days, involving huge volumes of material, serious real-world
problems, with large financial consequences. I loved it.

After two years I moved up to the Plastics Technical Center at
the same site in Woodbury, and devoted myself to developing
analytical methods for various aspects of polyolefins, and of the
materials involved in their manufacture, modification, and
processing. Although I found my work at Shell highly enjoyable, I
realized it was time to get on to graduate school, so I began to
study seriously and to send out applications. At the time I was
most interested in quantum chemistry, and received several offers
for graduate assistantships in excellent schools. I was close to
accepting an offer from the Theoretical Chemistry Institute at
the University of Wisconsin when the automatic graduate student
deferments from the Draft into the US military were eliminated.
This was in early 1968, during a major buildup phase in the
Vietnam War, and I decided it would be more prudent to remain at
Shell for a while since my industrial deferment was still in
effect.

In my off hours over the past few years I had met Judith Grace
Sampieri, who was a wonderful young secretary at Shell. We were
married on May 4 of 1968. Soon thereafter, even the industrial
deferment was lost, and we decided that I might as well reapply
for graduate school. Since Judy's family lived in New Jersey, I
decided to apply to Princeton University, and was accepted. In the late
fall of 1968 I was reclassified 1A for the draft and reported to
the processing center in Newark for my physical. At the end of
the day I ended up in the group who had passed. We were told to
put our affairs in order since we would soon be called up.
However, in a great stroke of luck, within a week, my wife told
me she was pregnant, and within just a few more weeks my draft
board reclassified me to some status I do not remember, save that
it meant I would not be drafted. On June 9, 1969 Judy and I were
blessed with the birth of a beautiful child, Chad Richard. Later
that summer, I held him in my lap as Neil Armstrong first stepped
out onto the Moon.

In the fall of 1969 I moved my new family up to Princeton to
begin studies and research for the Ph.D. in the Department of
Chemistry. I was lucky enough to be in the first group of
graduate students to work with Elliot R. Bernstein who was just
starting as an Assistant Professor at Princeton, after having
spent a few years postdoctoral work at the University of
Chicago with Clyde A. Hutchison III, following doctoral
training with G. Wilse Robinson at CalTech. Elliot's research at
the time involved detailed optical and microwave spectral probes
of pure and mixed molecular single crystals cooled in liquid
helium. I knew nothing about it at the time I joined the group. I
was certain that it was going to be both experimentally and
theoretically complex and challenging, but it seemed likely to be
worth the effort. My research project was the detailed study of
1,3,5-triazine, a heterocyclic benzene analog that we expected
would provide a poignant testing ground for theories of the Jahn
Teller effect. In the end we found that the crystal field
surrounding each molecule was insufficiently symmetrical to
provide the tests we originally sought, but much was learned.
Most importantly from my standpoint, I learned from Elliot
Bernstein a penetrating, intense style of research that I had
never known before, and I learned a great deal about the chemical
physics of condensed phase and molecular systems.

In the summer of 1973 we moved to the south side of Chicago so I
could begin a postdoctoral period with Donald H. Levy at the
University of Chicago. Levy had studied gas-phase magnetic
resonance with Alan Carrington, and had been doing some of the
most impressive research anywhere in the world with
microwave/optical double resonance and the Hanle effect on
NO2 and other open-shell small molecules. These were
the earliest days when tunable dye lasers were beginning to
transform molecular spectroscopy, and Levy's group was in the
lead. The optical spectrum of NO2 was the most
troublesome problem for molecular spectroscopists. Even though it
had only three atoms, the visible spectrum had far more structure
than anyone could understand. But since NO2 was
readily available and it displayed an extensive absorption
spectrum just where the new lasers could readily operate (500-640
nm), it was a favorite object for study. Don Levy and one of his
students, Richard Solarz, had made some major advances with
NO2 earlier that summer, so after I arrived in Chicago
I began to consider what I could do next. My biggest problem was
that my training at Princeton had been in condensed matter
spectroscopy, and the ultrahigh resolution gas-phase spectral
techniques being used by the Levy group were going to take months
to understand. The detailed physics of rotating polyatomic
molecules with spin is extremely complex. I was familiar only
with the physics of molecules frozen still in a crystal lattice
near absolute zero.

When we first arrived in Chicago, Don Levy was in Germany for a
several month-long visit, so I had an opportunity to do some
extended reading and to prepare for the final oral exam for the
Ph.D. degree back in Princeton. At that time in the Chemistry
Department at Princeton, the final oral exam consisted of a
defense of three original research proposals. I spent many hours
in the Univ. Chicago chemistry department library reading recent
journal articles, searching for possible topics for these
research proposals. On one day I read a new paper by Yuan Lee and Stuart Rice on the crossed
beam reaction of fluorine with benzene (J. Chem. Phys.59, 1427 (1973)] in one of Yuan's "universal" molecular
beam apparatuses. It was the sort of experiment that was to lead
to Yuan Lee sharing the Nobel Prize in 1986 with John Polanyi and Dudley Herschbach. I was deeply struck
by a passage in the paper which said that the supersonic
expansion used to make the benzene molecular beam was strong
enough to cool out essentially all rotational degrees of freedom.
That was just what I needed. Since I didn't understand rotating
molecules yet, perhaps I could just stop them from rotating in
the first place!

As a result of this exciting day in the Chicago library, one of
the proposals I presented to the Princeton Ph.D. committee later
that fall was to use a supersonic expansion to cool
NO2 to the point that only a single rotational state
was populated, and then to use a tunable dye laser to study the
now greatly simplified spectrum. I had found in further reading
that the current supersonic expansion techniques actually would
not get cold enough, so I added the further use of an electric
resonance "state-selector" to do a final sorting out of just a
single rotational state for study. I recommended, in fact, that
the 10 meter state-selector beam machine of Lennard Wharton at
Chicago could be used.

When Levy returned from Germany, I told him of this proposal, and
we discussed it in some depth. He was intrigued, but was
concerned that too much of the NO2 would dimerize to
N204 before sufficient cooling was
obtained. A few weeks later we discussed it again, and became
sufficiently excited to walk down the hall and ask Lennard
Wharton what he thought. Len lit up like a light bulb.

Wharton argued that we should first do the experiment on
NO2 expanded in a supersonic free jet, and leave the
much more elaborate state-selected experiment for later. I told
him that wouldn't be cold enough - the lowest rotational
temperature reported for a polyatomic molecule in a supersonic
beam that I was aware of at that time was 30 K still way too hot
to achieve the simplification we needed. Wharton smiled wryly and
swiveled in his chair to reach a research notebook from the shelf
behind him. After reading a few pages he looked up and asked
"would 3 K be cool enough?". He had already built a liquid
hydrogen cryopumped supersonic beam source with argon, and in the
research notebook had measured data for the velocity distribution
showing the translational temperature was cooled to 3 K. That, I
knew from my Ph.D. proposal, would be quite cool enough in the
case of NO2 to collapse the rotational population to
just a few levels. We would simply mix in a percent or so of
NO2 into the argon and make a "seeded" supersonic
beam. This would avoid the N204 formation
that concerned Don Levy, and may just possibly cool the
rotational degrees of freedom to near the translational
temperature of the argon carrier gas. Thus began the
collaboration that led to supersonic beam laser
spectroscopy.

On the night of August 8, 1974 (the night Nixon resigned from the
US Presidency) we recorded the first jet cooled spectrum of
NO2. The next morning Don Levy saw the spectrum for
the first time, and immediately recognized its significance.
Molecular physics had changed. Now we could study at least small
polyatomic molecules with at the same penetrating level of detail
previously attained only for atoms and diatomics.

A year later, Lennard Wharton came back from a trip to France
where he had visited with Roger Campargue and learned of the
concept of the "zone of silence" that exists in an expanding gas
at sufficiently high densities. While this zone is surrounded by
shock waves where the gas is heated to very high temperatures,
within the zone the expanding gas is exactly as cold and
unperturbed as it would be if the gas expanded into a perfect
vacuum, forming no shock waves at all. Campargue had learned to
fabricate a ultrasharp edged "skimmer" that could penetrate the
"Mach disc" at end of the zone and transmit the gas streaming
along the center line of the zone of silence to form the most
intense, coldest supersonic beams ever produced. Wharton told Don
Levy and me that using helium in such an apparatus we could
easily get cowl to 1 K and perhaps even lower. I was stunned. I
knew that 1 Kwas low enough to freeze out the rotational motion
of even medium-sized molecules such as benzene and naphthalene,
and all such molecules could now be studied without rotational
congestion.

Later that same day in a hallway conversation Len Wharton and I
realized we didn't need the skimmer. The probe laser beam could
easily penetrate the shock waves without perturbation, and we
could image just the fluorescence from the laser-excited
ultracold molecules in the zone of silence. We quickly built a
new apparatus that incorporated these ideas. With the
spectroscopic insight of Don Levy and with a series of graduate
students we published the pioneering papers on not only jet
cooled spectra of ordinary molecules such as NO2, and
tetrazine, but also on the first van der Waals complexes with
helium (e.g. HeI2), and with the vital collaboration
of Daniel Auerbach the first supersonic beam study of a metal
atom-rare gas complex, NaAr.

In the summer of 1976 my family and I moved to Houston, Texas
where I had accepted a position as assistant professor in the
chemistry department at Rice University. I knew of Rice principally because
of the beautiful laser spectroscopy that was being done there by
Robert F. Curl, and I wanted to collaborate with him much the
same as I had with Don Levy. The first supersonic beam apparatus
I set up was a free jet machine similar to that I had used in
Chicago, but adapted to use pulsed dye lasers in the ultraviolet
so that we could study more ordinary molecules such as benzene.
My first proposal to the National Science Foundation was for a
much larger, more ambitious apparatus that would for the first
time use pulsed supersonic nozzles. With these pulsed devices
mounted in a large chamber I expected we could attain a 10-100
fold increase in beam intensity and cooling, and by synchronizing
with the pulsed lasers in both the visible and ultraviolet be
able to study a vast array of large molecules, radicals, and
clusters. Being the second apparatus we constructed, it was
called "AP2".

With AP2 we quickly succeeded in setting the world's record for
rotational cooling of a polyatomic molecule (0.17 K). We invented
resonant two-photon ionization (R2PI) with time of flight mass
spectrometric detection as a means of probing the spectrum of
molecules in the supersonic beam. We used this to probe the
structure and molecular dynamics of large aromatic molecules,
particularly focussing on the question of intramolecular
vibrational redistribution. We also developed a means of
producing fragments of polyatomic molecules (free radicals such
as benzyl and methoxy) by directing a pulsed laser into a
specially designed pulsed supersonic nozzle, and studying these
cooled in the supersonic beam.

In the late 1970s in collaboration with Andrew Kaldor and his
group at Exxon we had extended the capabilities of AP2 so that we
could study a large uranium containing molecule (a
hexafluoroacetylacetonate-, tetahydrofurancomplexed form of UO2).
These were the days of the oil crisis, when there was widespread
belief that nuclear fission using uranium was going to be the
only long-term alternative. Exxon was working intensely on
laser-based isotope separation schemes, and Kaldor was heading up
a group to pursue the molecular route. Our experiment on AP2
ultimately revealed a beautiful sharpening of the infrared
multiphoton dissociation spectrum of this volatile UO2
complex cooled in the supersonic beam, just what Exxon was
looking for. Unfortunately, we began to succeed with these
experiments only after the nuclear release "event" at Three Mile
Island on March 28, 1979. Within a year, Exxon made a corporate
level decision to get out of the isotope separation business. But
Kaldor had become so impressed with the capabilities of AP2 that
he wanted his own at the corporate laboratories in Linden in any
event. Under contract to Exxon, we developed a smaller version of
the apparatus, and built two versions. One was kept at Rice and
lived on for many years with a very productive science history.
Logically, it was called AP3. The clone of AP3 was shipped to
Exxon in late 1982.

After a few years of intensive research we found a way to use a
pulsed laser directed into a nozzle to vaporize any material,
allowing for the first time the atoms of any element in the
periodic table to be produced cold in a supersonic beam. Most
importantly, we developed a way to control the clustering of
these atoms to small aggregates, which then were cooled in the
supersonic expansion. Now for the first time it was possible to
roam the periodic table and make detailed study of the properties
of nanometer-scale particles consisting of a precise number of
atoms. The field of metal and semiconductor cluster beams was
born. We shipped Exxon this new accessory to their AP3 clone, and
both groups then rapidly began to develop the new field.

As is now well known, the Kaldor group was the first to put
carbon in a laser vaporization cluster beam apparatus, and see
the amazing even-numbered distribution of carbon clusters that we
now know to be the fullerenes. Within a year we repeated the same
experiment, but now on an improved version of AP2 that had been
modified for the study of semiconductor clusters. The story of
what we discovered on this apparatus in September of 1985 has
been told many times.

The subsequent development of my research in metal and
semiconductor clusters, and the fullerenes is too involved to
recount here. Increasingly, the tubular variant of the fullerenes
has dominated our activities. Now our motto is "if it ain't
tubes, we don't do it". We are convinced that major new
technologies will be developed over the coming decades from
fullerene tubes, fibers, and cables, and we are moving as fast as
possible to bring this all to life.

Several years ago AP2 was dismantled and sold off in pieces to
other research groups, and the main chamber where the first
pulsed nozzle experiments were performed was sold off to a scrap
metal dealer along the Houston Ship Channel. Now there are no
supersonic beam machines of any type in the laboratory. Times
change.

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted
by the Laureate.